1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of manufacturing activity management and more particularly to multi-lingual translation of manufacturing instructions for manufacturing activities in a manufacturing management system.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the global economy provides a proliferation of options for businesses to expand into emerging markets, manufacturing success increasingly can be defined by how fast one acts and how well one reacts to supply chain volatility. Modern production facilities increasingly are becoming more complex as customers expect manufacturers to maintain low prices while readily accommodating last-minute changes in quantity, product configuration or delivery date. Thus, effectively managing the timing, order policy, and supply and inventory considerations involved in new product introductions or upgrades, greatly impact cycle times, potential business opportunities, and most importantly sales and profits.
With the location of global manufacturing plants around the globe, native language support for manufacturing operations has become an ever increasing management challenge. In particular, in a global manufacturing operation, different personnel can speak different languages irrespective of jurisdictional location, and manufacturing floor location, and further irrespective of assigned order and utilized computer workstation. Especially in view of modern free trade agreements, manufacturing even within a single location in the United States of America, mixed nationalities and languages has become prevalent amongst employees sharing the same job.
Current manufacturing floor control systems have been enabled in a single base language. Technologies for language globalization of computing systems intend upon addressing multi-lingual support for software applications. National Language Support (NLS) is one such technology; however, to install NLS on an expansive deployment of a legacy manufacturing control system would be cost prohibitive. Further, where NLS support has been implemented in floor control system, the NLS support tends to be global in nature and does not provide a granular level of language support on an order by order, activity by activity basis. As such, in an NLS supported system, each shared work station must change language setup for a particular employee for a particular native language so that the entire workstation operates in the preferred language. Of course, to activate NLS support for an entire workstation can introduce incompatibilities with ancillary applications, documentation, and tools that have not been NLS enabled.
Importantly, NLS support does not compute multiple languages for the same operator based upon different locations, different orders, or different order characteristics. For example, some manufacturing instructions are adequately processed in Mandarin Chinese, for an operator in a mainland China location, yet if a manufacturing operation performed in the mainland China location relates to the visual matching of an English language label for a manufactured product to a known bill of materials (BOM) structure, then the manufacturing operation ought to be presented in the English language even though the operator speaks Mandarin Chinese and the manufacturing operation is performed in mainland China. Yet, conventional NLS methods require an all or nothing approach to provide all manufacturing operation instructions in Mandarin Chinese or English irrespective of the manufacturing operation performed.